1. User's Guide
  2. Smart View and Narrative Reporting
  3. About Narrative Reporting

About Narrative Reporting

With Oracle Smart View for Office and the Narrative Reporting extension, you use familiar Microsoft Office tools to access and work with data in Narrative Reporting.

You and your colleagues work in a collaborative environment with static PDF files or with Word, PowerPoint, or Excel files containing refreshable data copied or embedded from Smart View. The Narrative Reporting workflow, consisting of clearly defined assignments and tasks, organizes input from many contributors in one document. Some tasks are performed in the Narrative Reporting web interface, and others are completed in Smart View.

With Narrative Reporting:

  • Use the web interface or Smart View to create a report package structure consisting of doclets of various types. In Smart View, create report packages in two ways

    • From a single Word or PDF document, and add more doclets to it later.

    • From a set of documents consisting of Word documents, PowerPoint presentation slides, Excel workbooks, and PDF files.

  • Use the web interface or Smart View to add regular doclets to a Word-, PowerPoint-, or PDF-based report package.

  • Use the web interface to add linked regular doclets, doclets that are linked to an Office document stored in the Narrative Reporting library, to a Word-, PowerPoint-, or PDF-based report package.

  • Use the web interface or Smart View to add Excel-based reference doclets, containing embeddable content, to a Word-, PowerPoint-, or PDF-based report package.

  • Use the web interface to add supplemental doclets, such as Word documents, PowerPoint slides, Excel workbooks, and other file types, such as PDF, HTML, and TXT, to the report package.

  • Use the web interface or Smart View to add a Word table of contents to a Word- or PDF-based report package.

  • Use the web interface to assign user access and responsibilities, including timelines and due dates, for the authoring, review, and approval of each doclet, reference doclet, and supplemental doclet in the report package.

    In Smart View, you also have the option of assigning author responsibilities when creating a report package structure.

  • Use Smart View to author Office-based doclet content directly in Microsoft Office. Doclet content is authored in Word or PowerPoint. Embeddable content in reference doclets is authored in Excel. Supplemental doclet content is authored in the appropriate Office application.

    You can work with doclets, reference doclets, and supplemental doclets in Smart View while connected to Narrative Reporting, or you can download doclets of any Office type and work with them locally.

    Note that Office-based supplemental doclets and Excel-based reference doclets follow standard doclet workflow tasks, such as checkout, upload, and checkin.

  • Download PDF doclets from the web or Smart View.

  • Leverage Smart View's ability to access various data sources and include individual data points, formatted reports, variables, or embedded content within the doclet.

    You can retrieve data from Narrative Reporting data sources and other Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System on-premises and cloud data sources.

  • Collaboratively review and comment on assigned review instances either on the web interface or in Smart View.

  • Sign off on the entire report package either on the web interface or in Smart View.

  • Finalize the report package in the web interface.

When you work with the doclets, reference doclets, Office-based supplemental doclets, and reference files in an Narrative Reporting report package, you can use Smart View to copy and paste or embed data from Narrative Reporting data sources and other EPM System data sources, including on-premises and cloud data sources.

For example, you can incorporate data from Oracle Essbase and Planning in the same doclet. A doclet in a report package in Word or PowerPoint may contain a profit and loss statement that was created from an Essbase source along with an income statement report created from an Planning source. The data points for the areas that you copy or embed are retained in Word or PowerPoint, so you can refresh the doclet to keep the data up-to-date.

See the Narrative Reporting documentation on the Oracle Help Center for complete descriptions of Narrative Reporting, including overviews and procedural information.